Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (53 page)
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Authors: Patrick Wilcken
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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Saudades do Brasil
, published in 1994, was in many ways the type of book Lévi-Strauss had once excoriated—an old-fashioned photo album of the returning explorer, with captions that sound as if they were written in the 1930s when Lévi-Strauss took the pictures. (“The attractiveness of the Nambikwara, notwithstanding their wicked reputation, is largely explained by the presence in their midst of very young women who were graceful despite their rather thick waists.”)
64
In the prologue he spoke of the fact that in comparison to the smell of insecticide coming off his half-century-old notebooks, which instantly recalled his fieldwork experience, the photographs brought back nothing. The only sensation he felt as he leafed through the sixty-year-old prints was “the impression of a void, a lack of something the lens is inherently unable to capture.”
65
But for anyone other than Lévi-Strauss, the images are richly evocative and reveal a keen eye for visual expression.
, published in 1994, was in many ways the type of book Lévi-Strauss had once excoriated—an old-fashioned photo album of the returning explorer, with captions that sound as if they were written in the 1930s when Lévi-Strauss took the pictures. (“The attractiveness of the Nambikwara, notwithstanding their wicked reputation, is largely explained by the presence in their midst of very young women who were graceful despite their rather thick waists.”)
64
In the prologue he spoke of the fact that in comparison to the smell of insecticide coming off his half-century-old notebooks, which instantly recalled his fieldwork experience, the photographs brought back nothing. The only sensation he felt as he leafed through the sixty-year-old prints was “the impression of a void, a lack of something the lens is inherently unable to capture.”
65
But for anyone other than Lévi-Strauss, the images are richly evocative and reveal a keen eye for visual expression.
He eventually found his voice as a writer in
Tristes Tropiques
, but by this stage his course had been set. He would be a thinker, an academic, a trader in ideas. The inner artist would find expression not just in the way he wrote but in the ideas he produced, the way he pieced together, like a collage, the wealth of ethnographic material he had ingested. An analyst of form, Lévi-Strauss’s own oeuvre was a hymn to proportionality; if it were a painting, it would be one of the Poussin canvases Lévi-Strauss loved, an effortlessly fit-together composition of classical poise. The massive body of work he left behind was a kind of
pensée sauvage
of academia; roaming the libraries, he picked and mixed, throwing out memorable if speculative ideas—hot and cold societies, bricolage, the science of the concrete—as well as the strange and beautiful images found in the oppositions cooked up in the
Mythologiques
quartet. His grand theories about the human mind, culture and indigenous thought became more and more impressionistic—an operatic backdrop to the imagery of his work. Just as he did not have the patience for fieldwork, so he never stopped to examine systematically the implications of his own thinking. Instead, he kept moving forward, piling idea upon idea. While his powers of invention might have waned in old age, who could begrudge a thinker who produced something of the caliber of
Regarder, écouter, lire
in his mid-eighties?
Tristes Tropiques
, but by this stage his course had been set. He would be a thinker, an academic, a trader in ideas. The inner artist would find expression not just in the way he wrote but in the ideas he produced, the way he pieced together, like a collage, the wealth of ethnographic material he had ingested. An analyst of form, Lévi-Strauss’s own oeuvre was a hymn to proportionality; if it were a painting, it would be one of the Poussin canvases Lévi-Strauss loved, an effortlessly fit-together composition of classical poise. The massive body of work he left behind was a kind of
pensée sauvage
of academia; roaming the libraries, he picked and mixed, throwing out memorable if speculative ideas—hot and cold societies, bricolage, the science of the concrete—as well as the strange and beautiful images found in the oppositions cooked up in the
Mythologiques
quartet. His grand theories about the human mind, culture and indigenous thought became more and more impressionistic—an operatic backdrop to the imagery of his work. Just as he did not have the patience for fieldwork, so he never stopped to examine systematically the implications of his own thinking. Instead, he kept moving forward, piling idea upon idea. While his powers of invention might have waned in old age, who could begrudge a thinker who produced something of the caliber of
Regarder, écouter, lire
in his mid-eighties?
The stature of Lévi-Strauss is such that even his harshest critics could not help but admire his output. American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, certainly no friend of the structural approach, put it well:
Whatever becomes of circulating women, mythemes, binary reason, or the science of the concrete, the sense of intellectual importance that structuralism brought to anthropology, and most especially to ethnography . . . will not soon disappear. The discipline had worked its way into general cultural life before: Eliot read Frazer; Engels read Morgan; Freud, alas, read Atkinson; and in the United States, at least, just about everyone read Mead. But nothing like the wholesale invasion of neighboring fields (literature, philosophy, theology, history, art, politics, psychology, linguistics, and even some parts of biology and mathematics) had ever occurred . . . More than anything else he cleared a space that a generation of characters in search of a play rushed to occupy.
66
In a world of ever more specialized areas of knowledge, there may never again be a body of work of such exhilarating reach and ambition. Few thinkers have been so relentlessly inventive; even fewer have covered so much ground. Lévi-Strauss’s inspired break from mainstream thought at midcentury changed the humanities forever. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, an era left rudderless after the collapse of the “grand narratives” that drove thought through a good portion of the previous century, one can finally look back at Lévi-Strauss’s extraordinary output with a sense of nostalgia for an age when thinkers still had intellectual space to work in, and were not forced down today’s ever-narrowing corridors of knowledge.
Epilogue
When I was six years old, my father gave me a beautiful Japanese print.
It was, you might say, my first exotic experience with another culture.
I still have that print. It is very old and in poor condition now—like
me. All my life I have been seeking to understand the meaning in that
print. Sometimes I think I have it.
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
1
1
NOT MUCH REMAINS of the landscape through which Claude Lévi-Strauss traveled during fieldwork in the late 1930s in what are today Mato Grosso and Rondônia states. These dusty scrublands in the far west of Brazil are now at the agro-industrial frontier—a bleak landscape of cane fields and soya plantations, punctuated with hamlets of domed charcoal furnaces burning wood trucked in from the Amazon rain forests farther to the north. Backlit by vivid blue skies, little balls of dust roll along feeder roads through the plantations—the great road trains transporting produce for export—in an otherwise denuded landscape. Many of the strange
cerrado
orchards that had once dazzled the plains with spectacular mauve and yellow flowers have been plowed under.
cerrado
orchards that had once dazzled the plains with spectacular mauve and yellow flowers have been plowed under.
The remains of Rondon’s telegraph line snake through the secondary forests of the indigenous reservations, hundreds of porcelain adaptors lying scattered in the undergrowth. Descendants of the peoples that Lévi-Strauss struggled to understand in his fraught journey across the plateau now live marooned in clapboard settlements, subsisting from food packages delivered by indigenous agency officials. It is hard now to read through Lévi-Strauss’s pocket-sized field notes without a sense of pathos, the pessimism that he was already expressing so well in
Tristes Tropiques
half a century ago.
Tristes Tropiques
half a century ago.
Lévi-Strauss lived long enough to see his worst fears realized—the inexorable rise of the world’s population, the wanton destruction of the environment, the wiping out of cultures that had taken millennia to develop and that he had spent his whole life trying to decipher. “This is not the world I knew, I liked, or can still conceive of,” he said in old age, surveying contemporary realities. “For me it’s an incomprehensible world.”
2
2
Longevity brought with it an ever-widening disjuncture. As far back as 1987, a
New York Times
reporter was describing Lévi-Strauss as “alert and nimble,” as if it was a surprise that a seventy-nine-year-old was still in such good shape. On that occasion Lévi-Strauss had quipped that he was toiling at his “posthumous works.”
3
But when he reached ninety, the years were beginning to weigh. He had by now largely stopped writing and no longer bothered to renew his passport. At a reception in his honor at the Collège de France, he spoke movingly of his current state of mind:
New York Times
reporter was describing Lévi-Strauss as “alert and nimble,” as if it was a surprise that a seventy-nine-year-old was still in such good shape. On that occasion Lévi-Strauss had quipped that he was toiling at his “posthumous works.”
3
But when he reached ninety, the years were beginning to weigh. He had by now largely stopped writing and no longer bothered to renew his passport. At a reception in his honor at the Collège de France, he spoke movingly of his current state of mind:
Montaigne said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter of half of the man. But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today. At this great age that I never thought I would attain, I feel like a shattered hologram.
4
He described his life as a dialogue between the decrepit ninety-year-old man he had become and an ideal self who was still thinking about intellectual projects that would never see fruition. As he scaled the nineties, the dialogue continued. At ninety-two he said that old age was dimming his intellectual curiosity, but added that he was still reading prodigiously in both English and French—Jane Austen, Thackeray, Trollope and Dickens, as well as Balzac for “the fortieth time with complete enchantment.”
5
But at the same time his sense of dislocation was deepening. Two years later, in an interview in
Les Temps modernes
, he was asked whether he thought about death. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m not calling for death, but I don’t have a place in this world anymore. It is a different world and I’ve finished my work here.”
6
5
But at the same time his sense of dislocation was deepening. Two years later, in an interview in
Les Temps modernes
, he was asked whether he thought about death. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m not calling for death, but I don’t have a place in this world anymore. It is a different world and I’ve finished my work here.”
6
A few months before his hundredth birthday, Lévi-Strauss became one of the few living authors to find a place in Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade—a prestigious collection of annotated editions whose list includes French literary greats and heroes of Lévi-Strauss, such as Marcel Proust, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Lévi-Strauss’s choice of which works would go into the seven-book anthology was curious. There were the classics, like
Tristes Tropiques
and
La Pensée sauvage
, but he opted for his
petits mythologiques
over the centerpiece of his career, the monolithic
Mythologiques
quartet. The only trace of this great work was the inclusion of a short interview he gave Raymond Bellour, in which he explained the labyrinthine logic that had driven the first three volumes.
7
A further absence was Lévi-Strauss’s PhD thesis,
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
, the reinterpretation of the field of kinship studies, which had established him as a leading thinker in postwar France. It was as if at the last moment he had chosen to excise the very heart of his life’s work.
Tristes Tropiques
and
La Pensée sauvage
, but he opted for his
petits mythologiques
over the centerpiece of his career, the monolithic
Mythologiques
quartet. The only trace of this great work was the inclusion of a short interview he gave Raymond Bellour, in which he explained the labyrinthine logic that had driven the first three volumes.
7
A further absence was Lévi-Strauss’s PhD thesis,
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
, the reinterpretation of the field of kinship studies, which had established him as a leading thinker in postwar France. It was as if at the last moment he had chosen to excise the very heart of his life’s work.
His hundredth birthday was celebrated across the world, but especially in France. President Nicolas Sarkozy visited him at his apartment; Arte, the Franco-German television station, devoted a day’s programming to him, with France 3 featuring a live television debate between the young Columbia professor of French Vincent Debaene, one of the editors of the Pléiade edition, and the eighty-year-old anthropologist and longtime Lévi-Strauss critic Georges Balandier—one of the few dissenting voices on a day of effusive eulogies. Entrance was free for the day at the Musée du quai Branly, where a hundred scholars gathered in the Lévi-Strauss Auditorium to pay homage. By now confined to a wheelchair after breaking his femur, Lévi-Strauss did not appear publicly, but said that he felt there was little to celebrate about reaching such a morbid milestone. It is hard to imagine a similar outpouring for an intellectual, let alone an anthropologist, in America or Britain. But in France, Lévi-Strauss fit into a long tradition of the literary-philosophical thinker who has always occupied a special place in the soul of a nation.
Shortly before Lévi-Strauss died, Gilles de Catheu, a French doctor working with the indigenous peoples in Rondônia, visited him in his apartment. In a piece for the Brazilian newspaper
O Globo
, he described meeting a well-dressed, physically fragile, but intellectually alert Lévi-Strauss, sitting in his wheelchair behind his writing desk. They talked about the Mundé, the tribe Lévi-Strauss had briefly visited during the Serra do Norte expedition. As he left, de Catheu gave Lévi-Strauss a
marico
—an indigenous bag woven from
tucumã
palm fiber. “He held the
marico
, looking at the handles with interest,” remembered de Catheu, “gently touching an object born of a thousand-year-old tradition with hundred-year-old hands . . . I have never seen so much happiness and emotion . . .”
8
O Globo
, he described meeting a well-dressed, physically fragile, but intellectually alert Lévi-Strauss, sitting in his wheelchair behind his writing desk. They talked about the Mundé, the tribe Lévi-Strauss had briefly visited during the Serra do Norte expedition. As he left, de Catheu gave Lévi-Strauss a
marico
—an indigenous bag woven from
tucumã
palm fiber. “He held the
marico
, looking at the handles with interest,” remembered de Catheu, “gently touching an object born of a thousand-year-old tradition with hundred-year-old hands . . . I have never seen so much happiness and emotion . . .”
8
Lévi-Strauss died of heart failure two weeks later, just shy of his hundred and first birthday. When his death was announced on November 3, 2009, the tributes poured in once more, with wall-to-wall coverage on television, and
Le Monde
alone carrying half a dozen pages and three obituaries.
9
Among the thousands of homages, President Sarkozy hit a false note, writing in an official communiqué that Lévi-Strauss had been a “tireless humanist.”
10
Le Monde
alone carrying half a dozen pages and three obituaries.
9
Among the thousands of homages, President Sarkozy hit a false note, writing in an official communiqué that Lévi-Strauss had been a “tireless humanist.”
10
A public funeral for such a revered intellectual figure would have attracted a grand procession through the streets of Paris, ending in a burial thronged by the great and good—politicians, intellectuals, students, as well as thousands of ordinary members of the public paying their respects to the last giant of mid-twentieth-century thought. But this was not Lévi-Strauss’s style. By the time the news of his death broke, he had already been buried in a small cemetery near his château in Lignerolles. The ceremony was attended by close family—his wife, Monique, his two sons, Laurent and Matthieu, and two grandsons, along with the mayor of the town, Denis Cornibert. His last wishes were to be lowered into the grave in total silence. “That wasn’t easy,” recalled Cornibert.
11
A simple gold plaque reading CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS—1908-2009 sits on the gravel burial mound. A stone’s throw away from this bare grave are the forests where, in summers gone by, Lévi-Strauss would go out walking in the afternoons, hunting for wild mushrooms, bundling them into his scarf as he went.
11
A simple gold plaque reading CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS—1908-2009 sits on the gravel burial mound. A stone’s throw away from this bare grave are the forests where, in summers gone by, Lévi-Strauss would go out walking in the afternoons, hunting for wild mushrooms, bundling them into his scarf as he went.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost I would like to thank my brother Hugo, whose contribution through many conversations and e-mail exchanges, as well as close readings of various drafts, was immense. I would also like to thank the late Professor Lévi-Strauss for meeting and corresponding with me, as well as allowing me access to his field notes and a manuscript of
Tristes Tropiques
. Professor Lévi-Strauss’s family kindly granted permission to use fieldwork images from the 1930s, as well as family portraits. Of the many people who shared their thoughts on the work of Professor Lévi-Strauss I would like to thank the late Rodney Needham, Philippe Descola, Anne
-
Christine Taylor, Alban Bensa, Jean-Patrick Razon, Dan Sperber, Marcelo Fiorini, Stephen Nugent, John Sturrock, John Hemming and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
Tristes Tropiques
. Professor Lévi-Strauss’s family kindly granted permission to use fieldwork images from the 1930s, as well as family portraits. Of the many people who shared their thoughts on the work of Professor Lévi-Strauss I would like to thank the late Rodney Needham, Philippe Descola, Anne
-
Christine Taylor, Alban Bensa, Jean-Patrick Razon, Dan Sperber, Marcelo Fiorini, Stephen Nugent, John Sturrock, John Hemming and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
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